A Film Canon

 

 

His Girl Friday relocates the comedy of remarriage to the fallout between disillusioned journalist Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell) and her former profession, with ex-husband and manager Walter Burns (Cary Grant) as orchestrator. This imbues Burns with a wry, directorial detachment, embodied by his half-smile, as well as the ease with which he levels insults at Johnson's fiancee Bruce Baldwin (Ralph Bellamy), most comic when they are disguised as a kind of naive flirtation, or thinly disguise his vicarious flirtation with Johnson. More iconically, this scenario ensures that Johnson's speech comes closer to the rapidity of the printing press than that of any other screwball protagonist, her tongue transformed into a "news-getting machine". In the process, the script achieves an unprecedented density - widened, but not lengthened - as other media-inflected voices are piled on top of Johnson's, producing a conversational depth-of-field. This reaches its climax in the final confrontation between Johnson and Baldwin, which takes place while Burns is on the phone, and Johnson at her typewriter, and sees  them unwittingly finishing each other's sentences - often incorrectly - as well as extending conversational participation to its technical accoutrements, as evinced in the typewriter's accidental reproduction of Baldwin's words, which prevents Johnson from fully registering them. At the same time, this scenario - which was adapted from a play about two men - plays to Hawks' taste for gender-bending, and, more specifically, for the incorporation of women into exclusive male codes, professions and vernaculars in the name of a demotic equality that also manifests itself as a fairly dark political satire, and whose logical conclusion is that the perfect journalist is an androgyne.